Nina Agdal very recently gave birth to her child (a girl) with Logan Paul just a couple of days ago.
But before that, she posed nude and pregnant. Being a supermodel, that seems a requirement.
If you want to see that picture (actually a couple of them), check the article below.
Logan Paul's pregnant fiancée Nina Agdal, 32, poses nude on a rock as she shows off her blossoming bump
There's so much space news these days -- back in early September, the Bepi-Colombo mission from the European Space Agency made its fourth of sixth flybys of Mercury, with the eventual goal of going into orbit around Mercury in November 2026 and then performing lots of measurements.
There's a fun video from the flyby below.
Back in the Great Lakes region for this week's lighthouse, which is at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. There's both a Main Duck and False Duck Island in that area, which both have lighthouses.
Maybe next week I'll take a look at the lighthouse on False Duck Island, but this week, it's the Main Duck.
Here is the location of that lighthouse, zoomed way way out for geographical navigation.
The Lighthouse Directory tells us the following about it:
"1914. Active; focal plane 23.5 m (77 ft); white flash every 6 s. 24.5 m (80 ft) octagonal concrete tower with lantern and gallery, painted white; lantern and gallery are red. Abandoned fog signal building and other structures in poor condition. ... Owned by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles from 1941 to 1959, the island has been owned by Parks Canada since 1977 and was added to Thousand Islands National Park in 1998. Located at the western end of the island."
Another website is Main Duck Island, ON (Lighthouse Friends)
Pictures are below.
While we've currently got a comet in the skies, a new space probe going to visit where NASA slammed a little asteroid to see what would happen, a short-term mini-moon, and hopefully a launch to Europa coming up -- this article describes a big hit on the Jovian Galilean moon Ganymede.
"The researcher [planetologist Naoyuki Hirata] found the collision didn’t just reorient the moon; it likely also had a lasting effect on Ganymede’s internal structure. The heat generated by the crash could have influenced the development of the moon’s subsurface ocean, a body of water hidden beneath its icy shell. This ocean is thought to contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, making Ganymede an intriguing target for future exploration.The impact is posited as the cause of the mysterious furrows on part of the moon's surface, some of which are shown below.
“The giant impact must have had a significant impact on the early evolution of Ganymede, but the thermal and structural effects of the impact on the interior of Ganymede have not yet been investigated at all,” Hirata said."
 |
| Ganymede from the Juno probe |
By what it says in this article, physics should be over. After all, isn't the "Theory of Everything" what they've been seeking for decades?
Magical equation unites quantum physics, Einstein’s general relativity in a first
" “We proved that the Einstein field equation from general relativity is actually a relativistic quantum mechanical equation,” the researchers note in their study.See, I told you so. It's all over. Take down the party decorations.
In simple words, this new framework connects the science that governs the macroscopic world with that of the microscopic world.
Therefore, it has the potential to explain every physical phenomenon known to humanity ranging from the mysterious dark matter in space to the photons emitted by your phone’s flashlight." "
“The obtained equation is covariant in space-time and invariant with respect to any Planck scale. Therefore, the constants of the universe can be reduced to only two quantities: Planck length and Planck time,” the researchers note."
Of course, that should be obvious.
If you want to do the reading, here's the article.
Daisy Edgar-Jones got noticed (which is a mild statement) for her role in Normal People, which required nudity and intimate scenes, but she's more than that, as she showed in Twisters.
On a recent red carpet at the Toronto Film Festival, she showed she's got a lot of what it takes to get noticed in show business.
As the scientific rewards from the Mars Perseverance Rover (yes, it's still roving Mars) continue to accrue, this Gizmodo article indicates that the going is going to get tougher and rougher -- and the rewards could become greater.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Is Finally Getting to the Main Event on Mars
The rover is set to tackle Mars' ancient hydrothermal sites, searching for clues to the planet's watery past and potential ancient life.
"In the upcoming science campaign, Perseverance will have to overcome slopes of up to 23 degrees and a climb of about 1,000 feet (300 meters) to summit the rim of Jezero, which billions of years ago contained a massive lake."
NASA’s Perseverance Rover to Begin Long Climb Up Martian Crater Rim
That article provided the image below, which shows where the rover is going. First stop is Dox Castle. Then it apparently exits the crater at Aurora Park, and ensuing goals are Pico Turquino and Witch Hazel Hill.
From this article in the New York Times:
Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny
Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a convention of the Moms for Liberty in Washington."His campaign stop on Friday was a reminder that Mr. Trump often gets away with doing and saying things that would spell certain death for any other politician. He can denigrate veterans and then be celebrated by the military. He can brag about sexual assault, boast about walking in on Miss Universe contestants en déshabillé, be found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of six men and three women, and still be celebrated as a protector and respecter of women and children by school board mothers concerned about a society they feel has become overly sexualized."
It doesn't make sense. None of this does.
Oh, and if you didn't know, en déshabillé means "in a state of undress". And Trump bragged about being able to do this. And Christians want to elect him.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
If we need a reminder:
I accidentally encountered a video showing the Marienberg Fortress in Germany, and wanted to learn more about it. So I'm providing some of what I learned about it here.
It's located in Würzburg, Germany. That puts it exactly here. The map needs to be zoomed way, way out to show that it is located southeast of Frankfurt and northwest of Nuremberg, roughly halfway between them. The fortress overlooks the river Main, which is the longest tributary (525 km) of the Rhine.
So the river must have been, and still is, important. Why is the Marienberg Fortress in Würzburg?
Palaces > Würzburg > Marienberg Fortress tells us:
"The original castle on the Marienberg, a hill which was first settled in the late Bronze Age, was probably a small fort built early in the 8th century by the Franconian-Thuringian dukes. The circular Marienkapelle is one of the oldest church buildings in South Germany and dates from around 1000. From 1200 an unusually large castle was built, which was extended during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For half a millennium, from around 1250 to 1720, the Marienberg was the ruling seat of the Würzburg prince-bishops, who also held the title of Duke of East Franconia.
Following the storming of the castle by the Swedes in 1631, Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp von Schönborn built a circle of massive bastions, which are the dominant feature of Marienberg Fortress. In 1945 the fortress was almost completely burned out, and its reconstruction was only completed in 1990.
St Mary’s Church (Marienkirche), which dates back to AD 706, the forty-metre-high keep and the well house with a cistern over 100 metres deep are impressive monuments to an over 1000-year history."
If you haven't seen it, I've got a couple of pictures of it below.
No, they aren't my thoughts. These thoughts are from an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post from Eugene Robinson.
Kemp is wrong. This is the time to talk policy.
Thought 1:
"But popular, common-sense gun laws might have prevented this tragedy. And this is precisely the moment when we should be debating and implementing those policies — before some other American community joins the mournful list that includes Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; Uvalde, Tex.; and so many others. The list to which Winder is now added."
Thought 2:
"Kemp and the Republican-controlled state legislature should immediately pass a “safe storage” bill requiring firearms to be kept under lock and key. Such laws, thus far adopted by 26 states, have been found to have widespread public support, according to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. One was proposed by a Democrat last year in the Georgia state legislature, but Kemp and his party refused to move it forward."
Thought 3:
"Twenty-one states and D.C. have “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seek court orders to temporarily confiscate weapons from people at serious risk of harming themselves or others. Having to visit a home to investigate the threat of a school shooting sounds serious to me. Even Florida and Texas — bastions of gun rights — have red flag laws. Georgia does not."
Thought 5:
"Wherever the rifle came from, a majority of Americans — 61 percent, according to a Fox News poll — support a ban on assault weapons. They were prohibited from 1994 to 2004, and the Second Amendment survived just fine. But the ban was allowed to expire, and Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to renew it."
Thought 6, not from the op-ed, but from me:
Stop the madness. Elect Harris/Walz. Pass sensible gun legislation.
Save lives.
News about the Titanic was dominated by the tragic (and preventable) loss of the Titan submersible. Since then, quietly, the wreck has been visited by a more professional and quieter operation (RMS Titanic Inc.), that is very carefully document the wreck as things slowly fall apart.
The Washington Post had a recent article about this effort (and there are several other articles about this online). After they were basically done, they managed to find an iconic statue on their last dive.
Titanic divers find long-sought statue, signs of accelerating decay
"In 1986, an explorer captured an image of “Diana of Versailles,” a 2-foot-tall bronze statue of the Roman goddess, lying in the debris of the RMS Titanic, more than 12,000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Diana’s exact location was hard to pinpoint from that photo, and the site of the shipwreck was still shrouded in secrecy, so explorers who might have seen her over the years didn’t disclose where she was.What it looks like on the seafloor:
Until now. On their latest expedition, researchers with RMS Titanic Inc., the Georgia-based company with the sole rights to salvage from the wreck, rediscovered Diana’s precise location and photographed the statue, which once stood in the ship’s first class lounge. The images are among more than 2 million captured on the expedition this summer, the first since 2010. The expedition also revealed that a section of railing from the Titanic’s bow had fallen to the seafloor, a change that researchers say probably happened over the last two years."
This is the last in my series on Los Angeles area lighthouses. I wouldn't call this the "best", but I think it qualifies as the most interesting in the area.
This week's featured light is the Point Fermin lighthouse. It's also in Palos Verdes, and it's pretty close to the Angel's Gate lighthouse that's on the breakwater at the entrance to Los Angeles harbor. In some sense, this could be the "official" Los Angeles harbor lighthouse.
Location-wise, it's right here.
The Lighthouse Directory has a long entry; below are some considerable extractions.
Point Fermin Lighthouse Society"1874 (Paul J. Pelz). Inactive since 1942. 30 ft (9 m) square cylindrical wood tower rising from 2-story wood Italianate Victorian keeper's house. The active light (focal plane 120 ft (36.5 m); white flash every 10 s) is mounted on a 13 ft (4 m) pole. ... The original lantern was removed in 1942 but a wood replica lantern was installed in 1974. In December 2006 Malibu realtor Louis T. Busch donated the original 4th order Fresnel lens to the society for display at the lighthouse. Building painted white with gray trim; lantern and gallery black. ... Saved from demolition in 1972 and refurbished in 1972-74 by local preservationists, the lighthouse was then used for many years as the park superintendent's residence. In 2002 a $2.6 million project accomplished a complete restoration of the lighthouse. A chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, the Point Fermin Lighthouse Society , supports the lighthouse and has opened it to visitors. In 2012 the lighthouse became available for transfer under NHLPA. The City of Los Angeles and three nonprofit organizations applied for ownership and in January 2015 ownership was awarded to the city. After various delays ownership was transferred formally in December 2018."
